MMMMarginalia
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Shakespeare.txt.jpg, Tom Scott (2013)
JPEG image compression is lossy. Every time you edit and save a picture, some of the original content is lost. But it’s difficult to see that with the naked eye, so I compressed Shakespeare instead.
That’s the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet, compressed at “maximum” quality in Photoshop: I loaded the text as a RAW, then outputted the compressed file back to plain text.
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Page 1: Great Expectations (2012)
Page 1: Great Expectations is an unusual typographic experiment designed to explore the relationship between graphic design, typography and the reading of a page.
Crafted to engage the culturally curious, Page 1: Great Expectations collects the responses of 70 international graphic designers when posed with the same brief – to design and lay out the first page of Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, a text chosen in part because it directly references lettering as Pip searches for clues about his family from the letterforms inscribed on their tombstone. The brief encouraged the 70 contributors to explore, challenge or celebrate the conventions of book typography. Each layout is accompanied by a short rationale explaining the designer’s decision-making process.
Page 1 is not just a book for graphic designers, it reveals the power typography has to influence and affect the way we all interpret a text. Many readers will be surprised by the attention to detail and level of engagement with the narrative on display, and aficionados of Dickens will be charmed by the idiosyncratic approaches to this much-loved text.
Contributors include:A Practice for Everyday Life,Phil Baines,Cartlidge Levene,Tony Chambers / Wallpaper*,William Drenttel and Jessica Helfand / Winterhouse,Experimental Jetset,Fraser Muggeridge studio,KarlssonWilker,Spin, Studio Frith,Robin Kinross,Ellen Lupton,Luke Hayman / Pentagram,Morag Myerscough,Erik Spiekermann,Sam Winston,Oded Ezerand Professor Robert Patten, Scholar in Residence at the Charles Dickens Museum, London, and Lynette S Autrey Professor in Humanities at Rice University, Texas.
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“German researchers have created a new DRM feature that changes the text and punctuation of an e-book ever so slightly. Called SiDiM, which Google translates to “secure documents by individual marking,” the changes are unique to each e-book sold. These alterations serve as a digital watermark that can be used to track books that have had any other DRM layers stripped out of them before being shared online. The researchers are hoping the new DRM feature will curb digital piracy by simply making consumers paranoid that they’ll be caught if they share an e-book illicitly.” — “New DRM Will Change the Words in Your E-Book”, Roberto Baldwin (17th June 2013) -
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“Printing The Internet is about the fear of information and the terror of having to face the monstrous amount of data that we mindlessly produce every day.” — (via printingtheinternet) -
from Phaedrus Pron, Paul Chan (2011)
424 pages
4.5 X 7 X .75 inches
Paperback ISBN: 9781936440009
E-book ISBN: 9781936440016
Published as a limited paperback and an unlimited e-book, Paul Chan’s Phaedrus Pron recasts Plato’s legendary dialogue on art, erotic love, and madness as unyielding sexual prose that stretches the limits of intelligibility and sense.
“Written” by typesetting the original text with computer fonts created by Chan that transform the conventional alphabet into an array of erotic idiolects, Phaedrus Pron unfolds as a relentless exchange of erotic verse between a philosopher and a young man in search of rhyme and reason.
Works of art in themselves, the fonts extend the possibilities of writing by rewriting what is written with a simple change of font in your computer: from Times new roman to…Phaedrus Pron.
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“Countering Marshall McLuhan’s fear of the narcotic state that the user of a medium can enter when becoming a closed system with the medium; reversed remediation offers a chance to wake up the viewer. It creates a state of critical awareness about how media shape one’s perception of the world. (Art)works that employ reversed remediation destabilize remediation mechanisms, by making media visible instead of transparent. It makes critical awareness possible because it lays bare the workings of media instead of obfuscating them.” —Reversed Remediation: Evelien Lohbeck’s noteboek, Saskia Korsten (2010)
via Anne Helmond
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BBS (Bulletin Board System), Etienne Cliquet (2011)
Université du Mirail, Toulouse
BBS (“Bulletin Board System”) refers to the first Internet forums in the nineties. This is all my Internet bookmarks related to computational origami presented as little public announces. Each little piece of paper is an URL that you can take away with you.
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“Future “books” will be bundled with soundtracks, musical leitmotifs, 3-D graphics, and streaming video. They’ll be enhanced with social bookmarking, online dating, and alerts from geo-networking apps whenever someone in your locality purchases the same book as you— anything so you don’t have to actually read the thing. Authors will do their own marketing, the reader will be responsible for distribution, the wisdom of crowds will take care of the editing, and the invisible hand of the market will perform the actual writing (if any). Writers will respond either by going viral or by going feral.” — James Warner on mcsweeneys.net -
Collecting Communication: Communicating Collection, Marwa K. Boukarim (2009)
This publication was the product of my final year project for my Bachelor’s degree at the American University of Beirut in 2009. It was preceded by a thesis paper about the significance of contemporary collecting.
The nature of storing information and mementos has changed drastically with the advent of quasi unlimited virtual space. This book deals with the overwhelming accumulation of correspondences in a digital age. Its goal is to make sense of my huge collection of letters, text messages, Facebook messages, emails, and chats by organizing them and finding new ways of visually representing the data at hand. This led to surprising relations between people in my life, the way I communicate with them and and how I archive this communication.
